In brief: A Person Is a Prayer; Warming Up; The Seventh Son – reviews
A moving family saga of migration and meaning; how sport is being changed by the climate crisis; and Sebastian Faulks’s imaginative genetics thriller
Parade by Rachel Cusk review – a brilliant and unsettling feat
With this freewheeling examination of creation, gender and art, the bold and original Cusk is ever more determined to write about life precisely as she finds it
Sunday with Harlan Coben: ‘New York City is a great city for walking’
The novelist takes us on a stroll to the Grand Bazaar, through Central Park and to Freeman’s on 72 Street for the best Reuben sandwiches
Anne Enright: ‘Give me Moby-Dick over Persuasion anytime’
The award-winning Irish author on her Women’s prize-shortlisted novel The Wren, the Wren, waylaying poet Paul Muldoon at an airport and why she no longer writes about her family
‘Is it a betrayal?’ Claire Messud on writing her family into fiction
For her new novel, the author drew from her parents’ letters and grandfather’s memoir. She describes the fears and joys that come with writing about family
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden review – the Dutch house
An outsider shatters the quiet domestic life of a lonely young woman in this thrilling debut set in post Nazi-era Netherlands
Beating Hearts review – operatic French gangster film suffers from bloat
Gilles Lelouche’s new movie aims for a Springsteenesque blue-collar energy but buckles under the weight of its own naivety
Hey, Zoey by Sarah Crossan review – ‘the perfect girlfriend’
The jigsaw of a repressed wife’s life is pieced together in the story of love triangle with an AI twist
‘It was high time I told our stories’: Jenny Erpenbeck on her International Booker winner Kairos
A pulse-quickening novel about a tempestuous age-gap relationship at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall has won the top prize for translated fiction. The German author and her translator discuss how it entwines the personal and political
The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma review – a brutal journey
The victims of Nigeria’s bloody civil war are given a voice in this tale of a man’s quest to find his estranged brother
Fast by the Horns by Moses McKenzie review – Bristol’s burning
A Rastafari’s tale of belonging and betrayal set in 1980s England
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker prize
Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany
The Horse by Willy Vlautin review – man and beast in harmony
A musician’s chance encounter with a half-blind nag makes him take stock of his shattered life in the author and songwriter’s latest succinct but compelling novel
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru review – sex, drugs and conceptual art
The novelist’s love triangle has its sights set on the elite insularity of the New York art world but its plot is programmatic
Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control; Wuhan: A Documentary Novel – reviews
Dali L Yang’s critique of China’s response in the early days of the Covid pandemic is thoroughgoing if academic, while poet Liao Yiwu’s account mixes fact and fiction to extraordinary effect